by Jan Morris
It was to be the most ambitious amphibious operation in the annals of war, but it sailed to the peninsula unprepared. Its intelligence was out of date, its maps were inaccurate, it had insufficient shells, no dentists and very few mosquito nets. Two hospital ships were considered adequate for the campaign, and the Army made its own grenades out of old jam tins. Some officers, feeling themselves insufficiently briefed, took along Baedekers of Asia Minor, picked up in the second-hand bookshops of Egypt. Nobody had any idea how many Turks were defending the peninsula, and the entire staff of the Principal Naval Transport Officer consisted of a steward, a cook and a coxswain. Security was appallingly slipshod, and every stevedore in Alexandria knew the army was going to Gallipoli.
Hamilton’s plan, nevertheless, was bold. He would assault Gallipoli bullishly from the south and west, and fight his way up it to command the Dardanelles from end to end—‘take a good run at the peninsula and jump plump on, both feet together’. The first objectives would be the commanding heights of the peninsula, Achi Baba1 in the south, Sari Bair in the centre, and the main striking force would be the 29th Division, which would be landed on five separate beaches around Cape Helles, the southern tip of the peninsula. At the same time the Anzacs would land some thirteen miles up the coast, to strike across the peninsula for the central hills. The Fleet, with its terrific gunpower, would provide artillery support; the French would make a diversion on the Asiatic shore; Hamilton hoped that within three days the lower half of the peninsula would be captured, the Narrows would be cleared of their mines, and the Navy could pass through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara. Handing over tactical command to his subordinates, as was his practice, Hamilton set the assault in motion and transferred himself to the Queen Elizabeth: and in that magnificent vessel, surrounded by the transports of the army, the battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the Fleet, 200 ships in all, he set sail for Gallipoli on the night of April 24, 1915.
There would be, General Hunter-Weston assured the men of his 29th Division, ‘heavy losses by bullets, by shells, by mines and by drowning’. Still the army landed on Gallipoli confident and excited, a tremendous naval bombardment having preceded it. The Anzacs, as ‘enthusiastic amateurs’, had been given what was supposedly the easiest role: though they were landed in the wrong place, and found their maps quite useless, they got ashore with few losses, shouting scurrilities in pidgin Arabic, and struck inland with such gusto that by dawn that morning a few soldiers had actually reached the central ridge of the peninsula. On three of the British beaches, too, around the tip of the peninsula, there was little opposition. At Y beach there were no Turks at all: at S and X beaches there were only a few, and officers keyed up for blood and fire found themselves helped off their landing craft by solicitous sailors, in case they got their feet wet.
At two beaches only was the assault as bloody as Hunter-Weston had feared. At W beach the Lancashire Fusiliers ran into such violent resistance, from Turks hidden in trenches in the commanding bluffs, that in a matter of minutes 190 men were killed and 279 wounded, before the British could dig themselves in. It was the landing at V beach, though, the southernmost beach and the most crucial, that was to provide in the first moments of the Gallipoli campaign a paradigm of the whole enterprise.
There the landing was to be made immediately below the village of Sedd-el-Bahr, where a mediaeval castle stood at the water’s edge like a memorial to more ancient battles. A collier, the River Clyde (3,900 tons), was to be beached to act as a large landing-craft, and from its hull, it was hoped, 2,000 men of the Munster Fusiliers and the Hampshire Regiment would move across lighters to the beach, and so up the bluffs that rose, steep but not high, immediately behind. The assault went in silently at 6.20 a.m. The naval bombardment had ended, only a cloud of smoke and dust hung over the cape, and there was no sign of life at Sedd-el-Bahr. The sea was calm, the morning sunny, and this was one beach the British knew—Royal Marines had raided the place two months before. Gently and quietly, in perfect silence, the River Clyde ran herself ashore beside the castle, towing her lighters, and at the same time a flotilla of boats approached the beach with a battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Everything was silent. The place seemed deserted, or stunned by the awful bombardment.
But it was Magersfontein again, or perhaps the massacre of the British on the river at Cawnpore long before. The moment the boats grounded a vicious fusillade of machine-gun and rifle fire fell upon them, from hidden positions in the escarpment. The beach was an almost symmetrical crescent, like an amphitheatre, and the Irishmen scrambling ashore were as unprotected as actors on a stage. Boat after boat was riddled with fire, the soldiers jumping overboard, slumping over the gunwales, screaming or leaping terrified into the water. Boats full of dead men drifted away from the beach, or lay slowly tilting in the water, and a slow crimson stain of blood spread out to sea. Only thirty or forty survivors, scrambling up the beach, reached the cover of a ridge of sand, where they huddled helplessly beneath the bullets raging over their heads.
Meanwhile the captain of the River Clyde, finding nothing to moor the lighters to, had leapt into the water with an able seaman and was holding the bridge of boats in position by his own muscles, crouching in the water with only his head and shoulders showing. A few moments later, when the sally-ports of the collier were flung open, and the Munsters and Hampshires sprang out, they were met with a blast of fire like the smack of heat on a tropical day. They died almost as fast as they appeared, blocking the doors and gangplanks, falling into the sea: only a handful floundered ashore and took shelter with the Dubliners in the lee of the escarpment. The whole beach now was littered with corpses—‘like a shoal of fish’, said the Turkish commander—and through the noise of the battle one could hear always the cries of the wounded men, spread-eagled on the beach wire, or helpless in the shattered hulks of boats. When General Napier, the brigade commander, approached in a cutter to take command, the men on the River Clyde shouted at him through the din to go back—‘Go back, go back! You can’t land!’ ‘I’ll have a damn good try’, the general shouted back: and almost at once he and his officers were slaughtered like the rest.
The hours dragged on in stalemate. At midday the vast form of the Queen Elizabeth loomed inshore, and through a billowing cloud of green, black and yellow smoke, poured salvos into the bluffs above the beach. The little village was a ruin, the escarpment was pock-marked and crumbled with shell-holes, but still the Turks raked the beach with their fire. It was not until night fell that the men trapped in the River Clyde could clamber ashore over the dead and wounded—and even then, when the moon came up a little later, the Turkish machine-gunners opened fire again. V beach lay that night in a confusion of anguish and disillusion. It started to drizzle later, and the troops slept there damply among their own dead and dying, while the guns chattered spasmodically all night long, and the great ships stood offshore in an ironic blaze of lights.
The imperial armies were ashore at Gallipoli, but the experience of V Beach was to be the true index of their enterprise, from which the romantic dedication was presently to depart, leaving only a reproach of muddled waste and heroism. Almost as the campaign began, news reached the armies that Rupert Brooke, their exemplar and their laureate, had not even reached the peninsula, but had died of blood-poisoning at sea, on St George’s Day, and had been buried on the island of Skyros. Hamilton was greatly moved. ‘Death grins at my elbow’, he wrote. ‘I cannot get him out of my thoughts. He is fed up with the old and sick—only the flower of the flock will serve him now….’
12
The Gallipoli campaign lasted 259 days, April 1915 to January 1916. In all half a million men were landed on the peninsula. Far from capturing their objectives by the third day, the British never captured them at all, but were confined first to last to footholds on the shore. Within forty-eight hours of the landings the two allotted hospital ships were on their way to Egypt, full of wounded; even the Anzacs had been driven off the crest of the hills, almost back to t
heir cramped beach at Anzac Cove, and their commander was recommending evacuation at once. So another legacy of the imperial years turned sour upon the British, for even after the failure of the naval assault they had supposed this to be another species of colonial war, against superior but demoralized Asiatics. It was well known, said a statement from Hamilton’s headquarters shortly before the attack, that many Turks ‘looked with envy on the prosperity which Egypt enjoys under British rule’, and anyway, as a staff officer wrote, the Turk had never shown himself as good a fighter as the white man. ‘Who could stop us?’ wrote an Australian private exuberantly before the landing. ‘Not the bloody Turks!’
Four months after the first assault a second invasion was launched, the landing this time being at Suvla Bay in the north, so that at the climax of the campaign there were three separate bridgeheads, with British forces north and south, Anzacs in the centre. But the three never joined up, and what began as a campaign in the imperial kind, a war of sweep and movement, degenerated into trench warfare, just as static, just as dispiriting, as the fighting in France. Only the setting was different, for behind the backs of the Gallipoli soldiers there lay always the tantalizing sea. Serene on the horizon lay the islands, and all around the peninsula were the warships and transports, always there, dowager-like among their torpedo nets, or moving majestically along the coast for another bombardment. Sometimes the soldiers awoke to see some famous ocean liner, the Aquitania or the Mauritania, standing offshore like a visitor from another world: at night the lights of all the warships, their searchlights playing, their signal lamps winking, suggested a great floating city, friendly and reassuring, and officers were sometimes taken out there, direct from their squalid dug-outs to the armchairs and starched linens of battleship wardrooms. The sea was always there, and always at the back of the soldiers’ minds, no doubt, was the thought that if the worst came to the worst in their long fight for the peninsula, the Navy could always snatch them off.
On May 25, though, the beloved and familiar Triumph, bombarding the Turkish positions from a station off the Anzac beach, was torpedoed by a German submarine. In full view of the soldiers she capsized with a deep metallic rumble, floated upside-down for half an hour, and sank. It was a traumatic shock. The Australians watched appalled, some cursing and crying with the horror of the spectacle, and from the hills above they could faintly hear the exultant cheering of the Turks. Within hours all the big ships were withdrawn to Imbros, and the soldiers, looking forlornly out to sea, saw them retreating fast into the evening, led by the battleships, with the smoke from their funnels trailing behind them. There was a momentary hush over the peninsula, as every man, British or Turk, watched them go. By nightfall they were out of sight. ‘All the ships had disappeared’, wrote a German officer, ‘as if God had taken a broom and swept the sea … the joy of the brave Turks can scarcely be described.’ The British felt a chill sense of abandonment, even betrayal, as darkness fell upon Gallipoli that night.
13
In hideous attack and counter-attack, interspersed with exhausted lulls, they passed the rest of 1915. Reinforcements arrived, ships came and went, twelve gunboats were built especially for service in the Danube when Constantinople was taken; British and Australian submarines, in feats of prodigious daring, passed through the Narrows and roamed the Sea of Marmara, sinking Turkish ships and sometimes bombarding roads—the submarine E11 actually reached Constantinople, torpedoed a freighter berthed beside the arsenal, and started a panic in the capital.1 But on the peninsula nothing was gained. The battlefronts were often no more than a few hundred yards wide, and the salients never more than a few miles deep. The British at Cape Helles won the whole tip of the peninsula, but never got further than five miles inland: the dour mass of Achi Baba, so close across the rolling downland, was never any closer, and the soldiers were never out of sight of the very beaches where they landed. At Suvla Bay, in the north, they achieved even less, but floundered impotently about the flat lands near the beaches, losing 8,000 men and never reaching the high ground at all.2 As for the Anzacs, though in a thousand skirmishes they hacked their way up the cliffs above their beaches, they never captured the crest, but were immured there in the end like troglodytes or fossickers, in burrows and trenches scattered over the hillsides, and straggling squalidly down to the beach. Often the Turkish and British trenches were only a few feet apart, and the enemies could easily hear each other talking; by the winter the fronts were labyrinths of trenches, and every sap or redoubt had its familiar name—Dublin Castle, Half Moon Street, Courtney’s Post.
The beauty of the place, which entranced many of the soldiers when they first landed on Gallipoli, turned sour with time, and an overwhelming sense of decay fell upon the peninsula. No longer did the soldiers write with such delight of the glorious sunsets, the hyacinths and the heather. Now the landscape became terribly oppressive, as the spring gave way to the ferocious summer, and then to a wet raw winter. Flies swarmed everywhere over the bridgeheads, day by day the wounded went away to the hospital ships queuing up offshore, the men grew dirtier, thinner, more unkempt, plagued by dysentery, septic sores, frostbite. ‘The beautiful battalions of April 25th’, Hamilton wrote, ‘are wasted skeletons.’ Corpses lay everywhere, blackened and unburied between the lines, or lost in inaccessible ravines, and their smell was inescapable: off the beaches the Navy tried to sink the floating bodies of horses and mules by churning them up with their propellers. The British infantrymen, patient as ever, grumbled their dispassionate obscenities: the magnificent Australians almost gave up being soldiers at all, fighting like brigands or guerillas, and sauntering among their dug-outs with their shirt-tails hanging out, or wearing nothing at all—‘like flies’, one New Zealander thought, ‘wandering about like aimless men’.
The beaches were a terrible mess, clogged with supplies, littered with makeshift jetties, tumbled about with debris, broken crates, half-sunken boats. Anzac Cove, it was said, looked as though everything had been washed ashore in a shipwreck: at Sidd-el-Bahr the scarred hulk of the River Clyde still lay among the wreckage of her lighters. Along the tracks that led from beach to trenches, now dusty, now deep in mud, teams of mule-drawn wagons toiled; often groups of soldiers, escaping from their dug-outs, splashed about in the water; often too, in a desultory way, the Turkish gunners lobbed a shell down, to explode almost unnoticed in the sea, or splinter a few more boxes on the foreshore.
Always the noise of the battle continued on the heights above. It was never far away; it was seldom suspended; it was often savagely intense; it achieved nothing whatsoever. Of the 500,000 men who landed on the peninsula, first to last, rather more than half were killed or wounded, and though on several occasions they came heartbreakingly close to success, and the Turks suffered at least as severely as they did, still they might just as well never have gone to Gallipoli at all. Was it so hard, Achilles? asked Patrick Shaw-Stewart, looking across the Hellespont to the plain of Troy—
Was it hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not—
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning,
From Imbros, o’er the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.
14
General Hamilton, one of the bravest and most experienced officers of the British Army, lacked one quality of generalship: fury. He was an optimist, but not a zealot. Considerately refraining from undue interference with his subordinates, he seems never quite to have grasped the whole momentum of the action into his own hands. His contact with the battle was more advisory than decisive. He felt for his soldiers, he was thoughtful to his commanders, he responded like an artist to the beauty and the tragedy of it all: but he was not a man to fall upon his enemies with a criminal hail of fire, steel and explosive, and he flatly refused, despite pressure from London, to use poison gas.
It was his tragedy that the Gallipoli campaign nee
ded just such a man of blood, especially as some of his senior subordinates were abysmally inept. Risky at the best, Gallipoli was an action that could succeed only by outrage and audacity. A few more old ships sunk, and the Royal Navy might have burst through the Narrows. An instant advance from Suvla Bay, rammed home despite all dangers, and the whole peninsula might have been captured in a day. They were terrible chances to take, involving thousands of human lives, the immediate success or failure of an entire campaign, perhaps even of a war. Hamilton, a man of his time, an Edwardian gentleman, lacked the cruelty to take them. He failed by the narrowest of margins, for by the end of 1915 the Turks were almost at breaking-point: but in the conduct of great affairs, nothing fails like failure.
Gallipoli was the greatest reverse to British arms since the American Revolution, and if it was launched in a resurgence of the imperial bravado, it was lost in the deadweight of the imperial tradition. Its senior commanders had all been nurtured in the colonial wars, a debilitating legacy, and the old burden of class, which Kipling had so anathematized after the Boer War, contributed again to the débâcle: all too often generals were remote from their men, if not in courage or esprit de corps, at least in everyday experience—or actually in physical distance, for sometimes they preferred to conduct their battles entirely from warships out at sea. The soldiers, though they fought on bitterly to the end, lost faith in their leadership. ‘Are we down-hearted?’ shouted a shipload of new arrivals, approaching the peninsula that summer. ‘You bloody soon will be’, came the mordant reply from a departing hospital ship.
For in the end a heavy pall of sadness hung over the exhausted armies, mourning so many friends. ‘For God’s sake,’ one officer wrote in his diary, ‘get me away from the Dardanelles!’ By the autumn of 1915 the British War Cabinet, looking bleakly out at the tragedy across the death-fields of France, had lost hope for the venture. Churchill was no longer at the Admiralty, and when Lord Kitchener came out to Gallipoli to see for himself, he recommended withdrawal. Game to the last and ready for another offensive, Hamilton was replaced by a very different general, the bluff and practical Sir Charles Monro: and by Christmas, silently and secretly, most of the army had been withdrawn from the peninsula.1